All posts in “Maggie Fox”

James Cooper is a strategist on the Content and Community team at Social Media Group (SMG). Follow @jamescooper

You’re probably familiar with and may, at some point, have used air quotes. But have you heard of an air hashtag?

Stowe Boyd showing the air hashtag at Defrag 2009. Image: Maggie Fox.

A few weeks ago, I thought I was quite clever and original when I crossed the index and middle fingers of my left hand over the index and middle fingers of my right hand to form what I called the “air hashtag” for my colleague, Karly Gaffney. Karly seemed to like the idea.

However, I soon suspected that something so simple must already exist in the vast web of ideas. Sure enough, after asking around the office here at Social Media Group, my suspicions were confirmed. Maggie Fox, SMG’s CEO, shared a picture she snapped of Stowe Boyd doing the four-fingered air hashtag at the Defrag Conference in November 2009.

I’m in favor of the four-fingered sign because it lends itself to photographs, whereas Barney Stinson’s gesture clearly does not. However, Stinson’s gesture does have the advantage that it can be done with one hand.

So what do you think? Should the four-fingered sign become the standard? Or should it be Barney Stinson’s flamboyant air gesture? Or should we scrap the idea altogether?

The internet is full of content which can quickly become a blur to internet users. The quality bar for content has been raised. Continually producing high quality content is not always enough to reach your ideal audience anymore. Content overload is now a reality!

Marketers need to make adjustments to strategy and tactics in order to differentiate content, reach the right audience while they are in content consumption mode, and help solve problems. These adjustments require a detailed understanding of your audience such as: topics of interest, common problems, and the delivery method of content.

Constellation Research has announced their second annual Constellation SuperNova Awards to celebrate and recognize leaders and teams who have overcome the odds to successfully apply emerging and disruptive technologies for their organizations. Our own Maggie Fox will be part of the all-star judging panel in search of these innovators.

Do you or anyone you know embody the spirit to innovate, overcome adversity and successfully deliver market changing approaches? Think you have what it takes to be subjected to a vigorous set of criteria that reflect real-world and pragmatic experience? Then you could be a SuperNova and represent the best of the best among the early adopters and innovators in the market.

Deadline is May 31 and semi-finalists will be announced June 29. Apply today!

Are social media sites the “killer app” for reaching a female audience? And where do female web users congregate? The great growth surge seen by social photo-sharing site Pinterest is driven by women, rather than the males who more often make up the demographic of geeks and early technology adopters. And BlogHer’s latest annual study, Women and Social Media in 2012, found that women who read blogs actively make more purchasing decisions based on that social weapon of choice than on Facebook and Twitter.

Clearly, women lead the social and spending uses of certain regions of the Web. Maggie and panelist Elisa Camahort Page, Co-Found & COO of BlogHer will explore these new realities and more, discussing:

Women who hold leadership positions in social media companies

How women are making a difference in the world through the Web

The implications from these numbers for online and offline cultural change

How an analysis of women’s use of social tools could impact your marketing plan

Big Data is discussed everywhere these days. It’s now understood as an unavoidable fact of life that data is being collected everywhere about nearly everything you and other consumers and businesses do online. But beyond that, it’s often a mystery as to where that data goes and how it’s used, supposedly understood only by a priesthood of big-company geeks and analysts – whatever, and wherever, THEY are.

Can we regular users and small businesses make use of Big Data, or will it always be the domain of the math whiz or Google engineer?

The nature of complex sales has changed dramatically with the adoption of the Internet as a research tool. People on the sales end are much less in control of the process because customers can now find out much about the supplier without asking them directly. Now vendors are adopting some of the same capabilities provided through the Net – researching the needs of potential customers and clients, discovering what will bring value to their companies. The B2B world is becoming one where negotiation can become more well-informed before it even begins. This webinar will cover this changing landscape, addressing questions like the following:

How do sales people train to operating in the Enterprise 2.0 world?

What tools are available today to both vendors and buyers that did not exist 5 or 10 years ago?

Social Media Week “offers a series of interconnected activities and conversations around the world on emerging trends in social and mobile media across all major industries. Annually, SMW attracts more than 60,000 attendees across thousands of individually organized events, with half a million connecting to the conference online and through mobile.”

With that in mind, I’m going round up some of the most buzzed about items from Social Media Week 2012.

Creating Music Community in the Digital Age

If anything, Kaskie was grieving over the disappearance of the carefully curated, tangible collections of music recordings we used to own — like the LP collection he still looks forward to handing down to his children, rather than the password to a cloud full of digital playlists that seem likely to be more commonplace. “You don’t own anything anymore,” he said. “How do you get people excited about anything when it’s so fleeting?” Of course, Kaskie and his panelists had a ready answer to that: you get people excited about music by turning it from an industry into a community. In days of yore — Kaskie joined Pitchfork in 2004, when Friendster was still in ascendance — building a community meant launching a music festival where people could share the experience of music. (Indeed, Pitchfork’s festival has become a centerpiece of the summer festival schedule in its hometown of Chicago. Last October, the franchise expanded to Paris.) Today, community means Twitter, where Pitchfork readers endlessly debate the site’s notoriously polarizing reviews. Community also means Spotify, feeding a steady, frictionless stream of your music tastes to your Facebook friends.

Big Media got big in the ages of broadcast and print, when corporations controlled the flow of content and consumers had few opportunities to interact and contribute. That balance has shifted radically over the past decade, as billions of consumers have discovered the social Web and mobile communication and were given easy tools to become content creators themselves.

In this webinar, our panel of experts will discuss the plight of Big Media - whether old business models have become obsolete, and how audiences have changed – and what it’s doing to save itself as an industry. We’ll consider questions like the following:

Where is today’s audience spending time and what content sources do they pay attention to?

Where is Big Media behind the curve of change in how it provides and gets paid for content?

What scares media corporations about the content models being invented on the Net?

SMG speakers will be coming to a city near you! Throughout the month of February, three members of the SMG team will be speaking at events across North America, check out if they will be coming to you:

February 16, 2012, Toronto
Discussing advances in our understanding of behaviour and decision making, how insights are collected in a fully digitized world and new tools and opportunities. A must for those looking to understand narratology, gamification and how to leverage online advocacy!
Speaker: Patrick Gladney, register online here

More companies now are monitoring Twitter and other online social channels and responding in real-time – often within hours or even minutes. They know the power of social media and the capability of bad news to spread like wildfire. They also recognize the opportunity to influence the message by jumping into a conversation sooner rather than later.

Join this panel to examine:

Why social media and customer service are made for one another

How your company can jump into social monitoring

Notable corporate social media gaffes and what was learned from them

Best practices for companies actively engaging customers online

The cost-effectiveness of social media monitoring and immediate response as customer service tools